Nelly LINDNER, née MITTELCHSTEIN

The 20th century, known in historiography as the “century of extremes” or the “century of camps”, was a period of radical change in the political, social, economic and cultural life in Romania and throughout Europe. It saw two world wars and the exclusion and extermination of the European Jewish population, who had been living on the continent since ancient times.

The Holocaust, or Shoah (from the Hebrew for “catastrophe”), is the term used in historical sources to refer to the extermination of the Jews, which took place throughout Western Europe and into the Eastern areas of the continent during the Second World War.

The victims of the Holocaust included not only French Jews or those who had become naturalized as French citizens early in the 20th century, but also Jews from Romania, who were victims of the Antonescu regime during the Second World War, when Romania allied itself with Nazi Germany. It is worth noting that not all of the 75,000 Jews deported from France to the Third Reich’s extermination camps were originally from France, as many had acquired French citizenship earlier in the century or were war refugees taken in by the French state in 1940. Romanian Jews who had become naturalized French citizens therefore became Holocaust victims in France. But who were these Romanian Jews in France, and when and how did they come to be there?

For Holocaust victim Nelly Lindner, the answer lies in Romania’s “city of seven hills”, Iasi, the city from which her family emigrated to France in the early 20th century. During the second half of the 19th century, the Jewish population in Romania increased significantly, in particular in Moldavia, which was home to many Jews who had emigrated from Galicia, then under Austro-Hungarian rule, or from other areas of Poland and Ukraine, which were ruled by the Russian Empire. They often took refuge in Romania because they could no longer make a living in their homelands, which explains why most of the Jews who moved to Moldavia came from socially disadvantaged backgrounds or had suffered ethnic persecution in the Tsarist Empire[1].

In 1878, 218,304 Jews were registered as living in Romania. By 1899, this figure had risen to 269,015, with 197,000 of them living in the region of Moldavia. As a result, in the early 20th century, Jews accounted for 4.5% of the country’s total population. By the end of the 19th century, around half of the cosmopolitan population was Jewish[2]. They also helped shape Iasi’s social and cultural life by founding the world’s first Yiddish-language theater. Even the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah (which means “The Hope” in Hebrew), was composed in Iasi. Naftali Herz Imber, a Jew from Galicia, wrote the first version of it there in 1877[3].

However, at the beginning of the 20th century, Romania and Russia, although their policies were diametrically opposed, were the only European countries that still refused to grant citizenship to their Jewish communities. Although Article 7 of the 1866 Romanian Constitution was amended in 1879 to include provision for the granting of Romanian citizenship to the Jewish population, during the first two decades of the 20th century, the Jews were still allowed to be naturalized as Romanian citizens. The 1912 census reveals that, at that time, the Jewish population of Romania was 241,088 (4.5% of the total population) of whom 228,430 were stateless and had not become Romanian. As a result, in the early 20th century, life for Jews in Romania was far from ideal from a political point of view: they were not Romanian citizens, and this only fueled the anti-Semitic sentiment that had been building since the 19th century. However, over time, the Jews managed make inroads into the economic and financial sectors, and even came to dominate some of them, such as trade and finance[4].

It is also worth mentioning, however, that between 1899 and 1905, 50,000 Jews left Romania for financial reasons, and by 1914, the figure had risen to 90,000, which is to say almost a third of the entire Jewish population[5].

After the First World War, in 1919, the Jewish population was finally granted the right to Romanian citizenship, which was then enshrined in the Constitution in 1923. Granting the right to citizenship did not put an end to the rise of anti-Semitism, however; on the contrary, it became endemic and extended to a wide range of social groups in Greater Romania, including students, politicians, financiers, etc. According to the 1930 census, the number of Jews in Romania was 728,115, that being 4.03% of the country’s total population of 18 million. The majority of Jewish people lived in the capital, Bucharest, and in the Moldavia, Bessarabia, Bukovina and Northern Transylvania regions[6].

Between 1922 and 1933, there was a steady rise in anti-Semitic riots, often violent, mainly involving college and high school students, spurred on by the activism and propaganda of far-right organizations, the most important of which were the National Christian Defense League (LANC), founded by Professor A. C. Cuza, the Legion of the Archangel Michael, founded by his disciple Corneliu Zelea Codreanu in 1927, which became known in the 1930s as Iron Guard[7].

In the interwar period, the first wave of anti-Semitic legislation came into force, which targeted the Jews in Greater Romania. These new laws restricted and then revoked their fundamental rights as citizens, paving the way for the deportation and annihilation of the Jewish population.

The Tătărescu government (January 1934 – December 1937) made its first anti-Jewish move on April 7, 1934, with the law on the restructuring of agricultural and urban debts. Its second, on July 16, 1934, was to pass a law on the employment of Romanian staff, which stipulated that at least 80% of the employees in all Romanian companies and at least 50% of their board of directors had to be Romanian citizens[8]. This “Romanianization” policy gained further traction in 1937, when 13 laws were passed that discriminated against Jews working in education, business and finance.

When the Goga-Cuza government came to power, it took the Tătărescu government’s policies a step further. As the first pro-Nazi government in Romania and the second anti-Semitic government in Europe, it enacted  a series of executive orders and laws aimed exclusively at the Jewish population, which deprived them of all their civil rights. Some of the government orders referred to the banning of newspapers (Dimineața, Adevărul and Lupta) written and edited by Jewish journalists such as Constantin Graur and Saniel Labin. Other ministerial directives stipulated that Jews should be dismissed from all civil service posts, that Jewish businesses and property should be confiscated, that State-produced goods should not be sold to Jews. In a move that mirrored the Nazi Nuremberg laws of 1935, it also became illegal to employ Christian civil servants under the age of 40. This flood of anti-Semitic legislation culminated in a law on the revision of citizenship, which led to a full-blown economic crisis, causing the Bucharest Stock Exchange to plummet and the Goga-Cuza government to collapse after just 44 days in office. King Carol II then took absolute power and Romania became a dictatorship (1938-1940). Between January 21, 1938 and September 15, 1939, the status of 617,396 Jews was reviewed, which resulted in citizenship rights being upheld for 392,174 (63.3%) of them but revoked for 225,222 (36.7%). In August 1940, Ion Gigurtu, a pro-Nazi politician and friend of Hermann Göring, introduced a new wave of anti-Semitic measures. Two decrees were issued, the first of which defined Jews as a “race”, a term that included not only practicing Jews but also anyone who had been baptized as a Jew, while the second made it illegal for Romanian citizens to marry Jews. These decrees also banned Jews from working in the civil service and certain professions and serving in the country’s armed forces. It also became illegal for them to change their names[9].

Prior to 1940, French state policy in relation to the Jews was a little complicated, but earlier in the 20th century, in comparison to Romania, France had been fairly tolerant towards the Jews and had had allowed them to become naturalized as French citizens. However, in the late 19th century, the Dreyfus Affair had had a profound effect on the Jewish community in France, as well as on French society and politics as a whole, and had soon become a symbol of injustice, anti-Semitism and friction[10]. In 1906, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French artillery officer who had been wrongly convicted of being a German spy was cleared of all charges. Anti-Semitism declined significantly as a result, and even more so after the First World War, during which many Jews served in the French army. In the 1920s, several anti-Semitic French newspapers were banned[11]. In the early 20th century, however, the influx of Jewish emigrants from the Tsarist Empire and Romania caused friction within the upper classes, who were staunchly secular.

In the 1930s, radical politics existed in France just as it did in Romania, but not to the same extent, in that there were no anti-Semitic laws in France prior to 1940. There were, nevertheless, a number of conservative and far-right organizations, such as the Croix de Feu and Action française, which was founded in 1908, two years after Anti-Semitism won the day at the Dreyfus trial. This goes to show that Anti-Semitism did not completely die out after 1906. These organizations went from strength to strength, especially after 1936, when le Front Populaire (Popular Front) was founded, led by Prime Minister Léon Blum[12].

After France capitulated in June 1940, the country was split into two zones: the German-occupied zone in the north of the country and the so-called free zone in the south, run by the Vichy regime. The fate of the Jews soon became a major concern. The Vichy regime’s first anti-Semitic decree on the status of the Jews was passed on October 3, 1940. Although the Minister of Justice, Raphaël Alibert, actually drafted the text, Marshall Pétain must have been equally callous, given that he and his government debated and agreed it. The Germans did not actually force them to do so, but some of the regime’s leaders believed that state-sponsored anti-Semitism was a way of gaining their sympathy. On September 27, however, it was the Germans who issued an order requiring Jews in the occupied zone to register with the authorities. A German memorandum shows that the Nazis wanted it to apply in the free zone earlier than the French did. In the twelve months following the first decree, the Vichy regime passed another 26 laws and 24 decrees that targeted the Jews. In June 1941, a second decree on the status of Jews extended the definition of Jewishness and banned Jews from working in several professions, and this was followed by decrees introducing quotas for Jews working as lawyers, doctors, architects, etc. As of October 4, 1940, foreign Jews in the free wone could be interned in camps if the prefects so decided. Some 40,000 Jews were held in seven main camps, 3,000 of whom died of cold and malnutrition before the Final Solution was implemented. In short, the Vichy regime, with the Final Solution in mind, treated French Jews as second-class citizens and viewed foreign Jews as an unwanted burden[13].

In parallel with the Vichy regime’s anti-Semitic policies, Theodor Dannecker, an SS officer at the Reich Security Main Office (SD), a branch of the Gestapo, pursued his own anti-Jewish agenda in Paris by pushing for ever more radical anti-Semitism. This left the Vichy civil servants with a dilemma: they could either let the German authorities act in the occupied zone at the risk of jeopardizing national unity in France, or apply the rules themselves, under German supervision. They often chose the latter. For example, on October 18, 1940, the Germans published an order requiring that all Jewish businesses in the occupied zone be “Aryanized.” However, the Vichy regime could not countenance these businesses being taken over by German citizens, so an interim administration agency known as the SCAP was put in place to ensure that they passed into French hands. As a result of this policy, by the summer of 1941, around half of the Jewish population in Paris had lost their livelihoods[14].

In the fall of 1941, the Germans pressured the Vichy regime to set an organization to coordinate anti-Semitic policy. This led to the formation of the CGQJ (Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives, or General Commission for Jewish issues), which was headed by Vallat Xavier and mirrored the structure of the Jewish Center in Romania, founded in 1942. Theodor Dannecker wanted all the Jews in France to join the one single organization, along the lines of the Judenrat in Eastern Europe, but Vallat delayed this plan until November 1941, when the Union générale des israélites de France (General Union of French Jews) was founded. This brought together all existing Jewish organizations in both zones into a single body, and they were no longer allowed to continue independently. This shows that in France, unlike the rest of Europe, in areas such as German-occupied Poland, Belarus or Lithuania, or Nazi-allied Romania, the Jews were not forced to live ghettos. Yet still, at least until 1943, the CGQJ continued to operate despite the Germans not thinking it not very efficient and being all the more annoyed by the fact its French managers said they were enthusiastic “Aryans”[15].

At the same time, in Ion Antonescu’s Romania, after King Carol II abdicated in September 1940, anti-Semitism reached new heights. As we mentioned earlier, these anti-Jewish state policies were nothing new. The following two years, 1941 and 1942, are etched in the history of the Holocaust in Romania, which became one of the most tragic examples of the extermination of the Jewish population in Europe. The story of the Holocaust in Romania was varied and disturbing, extremely brutal at the beginning of the war, particularly in the liberated territories such as Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia and in occupied Transnistria, then gradually more restrained as Hitler’s influence gradually ebbed away[16]. In fact, after Germany and Austria, Romania exterminated the most Jews, and yet more during the 1941 “Holocaust by bullets”[17].

The catalyst for the Romanian authorities’ mass extermination of Jews, carried out by the Romanian military police and armed forces, came in June 1941 when Nazi Germany, with the support of its ally, Romania, invaded the Soviet Union. On June 30, 1940 Romanian army officers were given free rein to execute Jews[18].

Massacres of Jewish people were not only carried out in the regions listed above, however, but also in Iasi, in Moldavia, a cosmopolitan city that witnessed the worst pogrom in the history of Romania. On the night of June 28 to 29, 1941, Ion Antonescu ordered that the entire Jewish population of Iași be expelled. He amended the order the following day, however, so that only the adult male population had to be removed. The order also provided for the summary execution of anyone suspected of being a Jew. The situation deteriorated further when Antonescu’s rather vague orders were acted upon. The massacre, which was to begin on June 27, reached its peak on June 29 and 30, when thousands of Jews were massacred in the Chestura police headquarters in Iași[19]. At around the same time, two “death trains” pulled out of Iasi, the first of which was made up of between 33 and 39 freight cars carrying between 2,430 and 2,590 “passengers” bound for Călărăși. Many of them were unable to cope with the unbearable travelling conditions, suffering from thirst, asphyxiation, starvation, etc. In addition, the route the train took was absurd: it took 17 hours to cover the 25 miles between Iasi and Targu Frumos, and this in high summer. 654 corpses were removed from the train along the way[20]. The second “death train”, made up of 18 cars and carrying 1,902 Jews, took eight hours to travel from Iași to Podul Iloaiei. At times, the train travelled so slowly that armed police and army escorts walked alongside it. The conditions on board were identical to those on the first[21]. According to some sources, between 3,200 and 12,000 died during the pogrom in Iași[22].

After military operations began in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, a process of ethnic cleansing, known euphemistically as “cleansing the land” in Antonescu government documents, also got under way. Thousands of Jews were killed in places such as Vijnița, Chernivtsi, Noua Suliță, Chudei and in Herța, where 1,500 Jews were rounded up in the city’s synagogues and shot. On July 17, 1941, there was a massacre in Chisinau, the regional capital of Bessarabia, where more than 10,000 Jews were killed by Romanians in collaboration with Einsatzgruppe D. At least 45,000 Jews lost their lives in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina.

During the summer of 1942, the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) demanded that Jews living in allied states such as Romania be handed over and transferred to extermination camps in Nazi-occupied areas. Initially, Antonescu complied with Himmler’s request to hand over the Jews, and the Nazi press reported that Romania would be free of Jews by 1943. The first Jews to be targeted for deportation were those from Banat and southern Transylvania. Adolf Eichmann planned for this to take place on September 10. The total number of people to be sent to the camps was 280,000[23]. In October 1942, under pressure from the Germans, Antonescu called a halt to deportations to Transnistria. According to historian Timothy Snyder, “the Romanian policy was that the Jews should be killed as long as they represented a minority that could be eliminated during the war without major political consequences”. When this was no longer the case and the Romanian state’s extermination policies were scaled back, American leaders made it clear that the Nazis’ atrocities would not go unpunished after the war. At that time, in cases of crimes committed against Jews between 1941 and 1942 on the orders of Ion Antonescu and his collaborators, it was possible to cite “major political consequences”[24].

One cannot imagine how Nelly Linder must have felt when she was deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp on July 31, 1944. Let us think back briefly to the time when, at just five years old, she moved to France from a country in Eastern Europe. She and her family eventually managed to integrate into French society and build a new life for themselves. Did she realize back then that their fate was a foregone conclusion, or did she cling to the illusion that the end of the Second World War would be their salvation? We will never know. But we know now that Nelly Lindner was to become a Holocaust victim, one of the six million Jewish people that the Nazis and their collaborators annihilated.

Nelly Lindner, née Mittelchstein’s story does not begin in France, but in her native Romania, in the city of Iasi, which, as we mentioned earlier, was known as the “city of seven hills”. She was born in Iași on September 19, 1905. In the second half of the 19th century, the city was a bustling cosmopolitan melting pot, home to several ethnic groups, including Jews. Her father, Jack Mittelchstein, was a Jew born in Warsaw, then ruled by the Russian Empire, in what is now Poland, on March 14, 1878. He and his parents, Abraham and Feiga, probably fled Warsaw for Iasi due to the ethnic persecution that the Jewish population was subjected to across the entire Tsarist empire. We only need to recall the pogrom that the local Polish community carried out in Warsaw in 1881, to which the Russian authorities did not react at all. This prompted some Jews to emigrate to the United States or to neighboring countries such as Romania between 1881 and 1884. Nelly’s mother, Rachel, née Gronfeld, was born on January 9, 1880, in Iasi. Nelly also had an older brother named Charles, who was born on January 12, 1904[25].

In the late 1910s, the Mittelchstein family decided to emigrate from Romania to France. The family may not have left their homeland for political reasons, however. Although most Jews in Romania were not Romanian citizens, there were no massacres of Jews, at least not in urban areas, unlike the pogroms that took place in the Russian Empire. The most likely explanation for the Mittelchstein family’s move to France was the 1899-1901 depression in Romania, which by 1914 had prompted more than 90,000 Romanian Jews to seek a brighter or more secure future elsewhere in Europe[26].

The first reference to the Mittelchstein family’s presence in France, according to the records, is dated October 29, 1910, when Jack Mittelchstein submitted a request to the Ministry of Justice for the family to be naturalized as French citizens. Needless to say, he had to give all their personal details. The Ministry of Justice also forwarded Jack Mittelchstein’s application to the Paris prefecture. In order to obtain the naturalization certificate, he had to submit his own birth and marriage certificates, proof of any national service, the birth certificates for any children who were still minors, including Nelly, and proof of having been resident in France for the last ten years (work history, employer references, rent receipts, etc.). If the applicant’s wife was a foreign national, she only had to sign her husband’s application[27].

Lastly, in order for his application for naturalization to be accepted, Jack Mittelchstein sent a request to the Minister of Justice asking for his family to be granted French nationality. His wife Rachel also signed the request. The request reveals that at the time, the family was living at 36 rue Vieille du Temple, in Paris[28]. However, in January 1911, Jack Mittelchstein wrote a to the Ministry of Justice to inform the authorities that he had moved from 36 rue Vieille du Temple to 7, Impasse Cristi, in the 11th district of Paris[29].

On February 8, 1911, a note from the Chief of Police to the Ministry of Justice reported that Jack Mittelchstein had completed all the necessary paperwork to obtain French nationality for his child who had been born in France. That child was Jarry, who was born in Paris on December 15, 1909. This confirms that the family had been in Paris since late 1909, and the naturalization was granted by decree on March 18, 1911[30].

There was also a fee for naturalization when applying for French nationality, and in the case of the Mittelchstein family, both spouses undertook to pay 26 francs over a two-year period. The family was granted French citizenship and the certificate of acquisition of French nationality was issued on March 22, 1911, together with an invoice for the postage. There was also 3 francs stamp duty and a fee of 16 francs for the seal, making the total expenditure 19 francs and 32 cents.

On December 17, 1934, Jack Mittelchstein wrote another letter to the Ministry of Justice, in which he noted that he and his wife had Polish and Romanian roots and that two of their children, Charles and Nelly, were originally Romanian. The letter also reveals that at the time, the family was living at 44 rue Cheyne in Ivry Seine, near Paris. However, the main purpose of the letter related to his third son Jarry, who was born in Paris on December 15, 1909. Jack Mittelchstein wanted to obtain a copy of Jarry’s birth certificate. The original birth certificate had been sent to the Ministry of Justice when the family applied for French citizenship in March 1911, and a copy had been made. Jack Mittelchstein must therefore have needed this copy, presumably because the original had since been lost[31].

An important milestone in Nelly’s life was when she married Joseph Lindner, a Jewish man who was born in Paris on October 16, 1902. Their only child, Maryse, was born on June 7, 1930[32].

Along with the rest of the Jews in France, some 300,000 people in total, Nelly and her family were adversely affected by the fall of the French Third Republic to the Third Reich during the Second World War and the establishment of the Vichy regime in the southern part of France. The French state was divided into two zones: the German-occupied zone in the northern part of the country and the so-called free zone in the south, which was in reality run by a puppet government known as the Vichy regime.

In addition to abolishing civil liberties for French and foreign Jews who lived in France but had not become French citizens, the German authorities in the occupied zone “Aryanized” the French economy in 1940 by confiscating Jewish-owned businesses[33]. This policy impacted the Linder family directly: records show that they were sales people and most likely owned a business[34]. By 1941, due to the confiscation of Jewish financial assets, around half of the Jews in Paris had no commercial or industrial income. In May 1944, more than 40,000 industrial and commercial businesses were confiscated and placed in the hands of the Ministry of Industrial Production, which oversaw the economy in both the occupied and the free zones. Around three quarters of these businesses were sold to French citizens[35].

In Paris, where Nelly Lindner and her family lived, German occupation also had a huge impact on the Jews’ day-to-day lives. As of August 1941, they were banned from owning radios and bicycles, and the Linder family, who were shopkeepers, most likely had both. From February onwards, they were not allowed to leave the house except at certain times. In June, Nelly Lindner, in common with all other Jews in the occupied zone, had to wear a yellow star to show that she was Jewish. Meanwhile, they were allowed to travel on the Paris subway, but only in the last car. They were also banned from going to public places such as cinemas, parks, sports grounds, libraries and restaurants[36].

On May 14, 1941, the Germans carried out the first roundup in Paris. They targeted the foreign-born Jewish population, mainly those from Poland and Czechoslovakia, and arrested around 3,710 people. In August, a raid in the 11th district of Paris, which was home to more affluent French Jews led to the arrest of 4,230 Jews, both French and foreign. At the time, Nelly Lindner was living in Ivry-sur-Seine, to the south-east of Paris. Jews living in such areas, at least in 1941, were less affected by the roundups than those who lived in the city. The arrests that year were only a prelude to the great Paris roundup that took place in the summer of 1942, which was most likely what prompted Nelly Lindner and her family to seek refuge in the south of France. Most of the Jews that the French police arrested in Paris in July 1942 were taken to Drancy internment camp, where Nelly Lindner ended up two years later. We should also mention that during these roundups, the French police in Paris, led by René Bousquet, worked closely with Pierre Laval, the Prime Minister of the Vichy regime, and Marshal Philippe Pétain, all in collaboration with the Germans[37].

After the Vel d’Hiver roundup in July 1942, many Jews from Paris sought refuge in the south of France, thinking they would be safe there. This was probably when Nelly Lindner, her husband Joseph Lindner and their daughter Maryse went into hiding, initially in the city of Toulouse, in the Haute-Garonne department of France[38]. They then relocated to Cannes on the French Riviera. It should be noted that between 1940 and 1943, the Alpes-Maritimes area, in which Cannes is located, was run neither by the Germans nor the Vichy regime, but by the fascist Italian government, which had introduced an anti-Semitic policy in 1938[39].

Meanwhile, when Nelly Lindner was living in the south of France, the French authorities in the free zone promised the Germans that they would arrest the Jews living there and transfer them to the occupied zone. They were given a quota of 10,000 Jews, which in fact they exceeded. The year 1942 saw the largest number of Jews deported from France: 41,951 people were sent to the Third Reich’s extermination camps. In 1943, the number of Jews deported was significantly lower, at 17,069[40].

If Nelly Lindner and her family did not escape to the south after the roundups in Paris in July 1942, they may have left after the arrests on February 10, 1943, although this seems unlikely. 1,549 Jews who had not been naturalized as French citizens were arrested during this roundup, 500 of whom were over the age of 70. A month earlier, in January 1943, the Ordnungspolizei (German police in France), led by Karl Oberg, together with the Gestapo and the French police led by René Bousquet, had carried out a roundup of Jews in the city of Marseille, on the south coast of France. Some 40,000 Jews were rounded up in the city, 30,000 were expelled from the Vieux-Port port area and 2,000 were deported to the Royallieu-Compiègne camp in northern France, and from there to Nazi extermination camps[41].

According to the records, Nelly Lindner’s family initially fled to the city of Toulouse, in southwestern France. They probably chose that area because, in common with tens of thousands of other French Jews, they were hoping to escape to Spain. The records also show that Nelly Lindner, together with her husband and daughter, also spent some time in Saint-Girons, in the Ariège department of France, which is only around 30 miles from the Spanish border.

Presumably, they planned to flee from there into Spain, hoping to find a reliable local guide in a village such as Saint-Girons to help them cross the Pyrenees mountains. Crossing the border into Spain was no easy undertaking, especially since it was closely guarded by both the French and German police. Aside from that, Spain it was not exactly a safe country either. Under Franco’s government, 300 French Jews were deported from Spain between 1942 and 1943. With that in mind, the Lindner family probably concluded that the best option would be to cross the border and then head for a Spanish or Portuguese port and try to leave mainland Europe altogether[42].

The reasons behind Nelly Lindner and her family’s reluctance to cross the Spanish border are not documented in the archives, but it is safe to assume that they were unable to find a “passeur”, or “people smuggler” that they trusted with their lives. Another possibility is that they simply did not have the financial means to pay for such a guide. After all, most guides only helped Jews in exchange for money, and many of them were totally unscrupulous. It is also possible that they were afraid of being caught, given the huge number of French and German police patrols stationed along the border.

We do not know if the Lindner family actually attempted to cross the mountains via the isolated village of Aulus-les-Bains, near Saint-Girons, from which thousands of Jews attempted to escape with the help of local guides, but one thing is certain: they ended up staying in France. The next place they appear in the records is in Nice, which was then under Italian rule. The Italian approach to anti-Semitism, as opposed to the German approach, was not to exterminate the Jewish population or to deport them to extermination camps, at least not until 1943. It was for precisely that reason that more than 30,000,000 Jews were living in the city of Nice at the time, most of them refugees from German-occupied northern France. However, everything changed dramatically in 1943, when all of Italian-occupied Europe fell into German hands. SS officer Alois Bruner (Adolf Eichmann’s right-hand man) who was in charge of Drancy camp and was notorious for his sadism, having wiped out the Jews in the ghetto in Thessaloniki and arrested huge numbers of Jews in Paris, took on the task of exterminating the Jewish population in Nice. However, neither the Gestapo nor the French police had any clear information on the numbers of Jews in the city, or where to find them, so their efforts to round them up were rather haphazard. In the end, they arrested around 1,800 Jews, far fewer than the Germans had anticipated[43].

In 1944, the Germans changed their strategy, as they felt that too few Jews had been arrested in 1943. Paty de Clam replaced Louis Darquier as head of the General Commission for Jewish Affairs. Meanwhile, the French police began scaling back their support for the Germans and strengthening their ties with the extremist French militia group. During the first eight months of 1944, before France was liberated, 14,833 Jews were deported to extermination camps in the Nazi-held countries[44]. This was when the Lindner family finally fell victim to the Holocaust. Nelly, her husband Joseph and their daughter Maryse were arrested on June 8, 1944, at the Villa Jeanne d’Arc in Le Cannet, on the Côte d’Azur, in the Alpes-Maritimes department of France. There is no record of exactly who arrested the Lindner family but there are a number of possibilities. It could have been the Ordnungspolizei (German police), the Gestapo, the French police, the French Militia or the Carlingue (the French Gestapo).

The circumstances surrounding the arrest are not entirely clear. The most likely reason was that a French person informed the French or German authorities that the Lindner family, who were Jewish, were staying at the Villa Jeanne d’Arc. The question is, however, who reported them? Informers and collaborators in France during the Second World War had a number of different motives for collaborating with the German authorities. They were often sadists, opportunists, sometimes members of the 1930s organized crime gangs, anti-Semites or bigots, not to mention people intent on settling scores with their rivals[45].

We know from the records that Nelly Lindner’s husband, Joseph Lindner, then aged 41, worked at a UGIF (Union Générale des Israelites de France, or General Union of French Jews) children’s home, the Lamarck-Secrétan center at 70 avenue Secrétan, in the 19th district of Paris. UGIF homes took in Jewish children, many of whose parents had been arrested and deported to concentration camps. In the spring of 1944, the Gestapo began arresting the staff and children in such centers. A well-known example of this took place at the children’s home in Izieu, in the Ain department of France, where a Gestapo unit from Lyon led by Klaus Barbie (the notorious Butcher of Lyon) arrested 7 adults and 44 children, who were between the ages of 4 and 17[46].

The center where Joseph Lindner worked was raided on the night of July 21-22, 1944, and 125 children and 52 adults were arrested. That same night, four other UGIF homes were also raided. It is worth noting that Nelly Lindner’s husband was one of the few adult staff members who were arrested anywhere other than in Paris and, more importantly, that he was probably the first person affiliated with the organization who the authorities arrested, since he was arrested on June 8, 44 days before the Paris roundups[47].

After Nelly, Joseph and their daughter Maryse were arrested, they were interrogated in Nice. We know from the 1962 report drawn up by the Deportation Office of the Ministry for Veterans Affairs and Victims of War, based on the Drancy camp archives, that they were interned on July 12. Between June 8, when Nelly Lindner was arrested, and July 12, they were held in a small internment camp in the south of France, which was called the National. Of course, after they were arrested, the Gestapo very probably interrogated Joseph Lindner, as he worked at the Lamarck center, which the Germans raided in July. AloÏs Brunner, the SS officer who gave the order to raid the Jewish children’s homes, was already notorious for having carried out the roundups in Paris in 1942 and Nice in 1943. AloÏs Brunner was also in charge of Drancy camp, which had been run by the French authorities since 1943. Around 70,000 Jews were interned in this transit camp and then sent to extermination camps in Nazi-occupied regions such as central Poland, which was known as the General Government at the time. When she arrived in Drancy, Nelly, like all the other Jews who were held in internment or extermination camps, was assigned a serial number, which in her case was 25,052[48].

On July 31, Nelly Lindner, together with her family and more than 1,300 other people, were deported on Convoy 77 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Nazi-occupied Poland. Just 25 days later, the Allied troops liberated Paris, but sadly, they arrived too late to save the Lindner family. The train arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau on August 3. Along the way, some of the 1,300 people packed into the cattle cars probably fell victim to the appalling conditions. For those who survived, what awaited them at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was nothing like what they had experienced in Drancy. In the Auschwitz camp, managed by Rudolf Höss, around 2,000 Jews were exterminated each day. Between May and early fall 1944, that number rose to around 10,000, and it increased again when more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews arrived. At the beginning of August, when Nelly Lindner would have caught a glimpse of the camp, it was truly apocalyptic, as the incineration of bodies in the Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II and Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria reached its climax[49].

 

Our work on Nelly Lindner’s biography involved various different steps.

1. Introduction to the project (in Romanian)
2. Watching films as a group/separately, including The Pianist and Life is Beautiful.
3. Reading novels and essays.
4. Visit to the synagogue with Mr dl. Fredi Goldinberg – President of the Jewish Community Botosani.
5. Guided tour of the cemetery.
6. Inviting some historians to speak (in order to get a general overview of Jewish life in Romania and in Botoşani)
7. Making contact with (any possible) descendants of Nelly LINDNER (also known as LINDWEISS) née MITTELCHTEIN.
8. Searching for witnesses, and interviewing them
9. Research in various archives
10. Research in the local press and in the French press of the time
11. Research in books/historical documents
12. Writing the biography
13. Publishing the biography

The project was featured on the school’s website, the Convoy 77 website and in the local press, as well as in an exhibition at the school.

Notes & References

[1] http://efnord.eforie.ro/web-holocaust/europa.htm

[2] https://www.gandul.ro/actualitate/evolutia-comunitatii-evreiesti-din-romania-de-la-peste-700-000-in-anii-30-la-situatia-din-prezent-istoria-comunitatii-scrisa-si-in-cartea-sfanta-20070840

[3] https://www.yadvashem.org/education/other-languages/romanian/educational-materials/iasi-pogrom.html

[4] https://www.zf.ro/ziarul-de-duminica/romani-si-evrei-in-secolul-xx-de-petre-turlea-12155045

[5] Carol Iancu, Româniainterbelică. Modernizarea politico-instituționalășidiscursnațional, coordonatori (Interwar Romania. Political-institutional modernization and national discourse), coordinated by Sorin Radu, Oliver Jens Schimitt, Editura Polirom, Iași,2023, p.473

[6] https://www.rri.ro/ro_ro/minoritatea_evreiasca_din_romania_mare-2658453

[7] Carol Iancu, op.cit, p.493

[8] http://holocausttransilvania.ro/ro/exhibits/show/legislatia-antisemita-exp/legislatia-antisemita-ro

[9] Carol Iancu, op.cit, pp.499-503

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair#Consequences_of_the_Dreyfus_affair

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_France#Dreyfus_affair

[12] Paul Johnson, O Istorieevreilor (A history of the Jews), Editura Humanitas, București, 2019, pp.525-526

[13] Julian Jackson, Franța – Anii întunecați 1940-1944 (France – The dark years 1940-1944), pp.515-516

[14] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/france

[15] Julian Jackson, op. cit., pp.517 și 519

[16] Ovidiu Raețchi, Istoria Holocaustului. Desființareaomului de la ascensiunealui Hitler până la execuțialui Eichmann (History of the Holocaust. The dismantling of man from the rise of Hitler to the execution of Eichmann), Editura Litera, București, 2022, p.326

[17] Paul Johnson, op. cit, p.573

[18] Jean Ancel, Contribuții la istoria românilor. Problema evreiască (Contributions to Romanian history. The Jewish Question ) 1933-1944. Vol.1, Editura Hasefer, București, 2001, p.113

[19] https://historia.ro/sectiune/general/amintiri-de-la-masacrul-evreilor-din-iasi-video-585107.html

[20] Radu Ioanid, Pogromul de la Iași (The Pogrom in Iasi), Editura Polirom, Iași, 2021, p.70

[21] Radu Ioanid, op. cit., p.95

[22] Ibidem, p.106

[23] Ibidem, p.350

[24] Timothy Snyder, Pământul negru. Holocaustul ca istorieșiavertisment (Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning)

[25] Document 1

[26] Carol Iancu, Româniainterbelică. Modernizarea politico-instituționalășidiscursnațional, coordonatori (Interwar Romania. Political-institutional modernization and national discourse), coordinated by Sorin Radu, Oliver Jens Schimitt, Editura Polirom, Iași,2023, p.473

[27] Documents 2-3

[28] Document 5

[29] Document 11

[30] Document 6; “In response to your telegram of 28 January concerning the application for naturalization of Jack Mittelchstein, I have the honour to inform you that the applicant, after having received your instructions, has made known his intention to complete without delay the necessary declarations in order to confer French citizenship definitively on his minor child born in France. He has received the documents which you sent me in this letter.”

[31] Document 13-14

[32] https://ressources.memorialdelashoah.org/notice.php?qt=dismax&q=lindner&start=0&rows=1&fq=diffusion%3A%28%5B4%20TO%204%5D%29&from=resultat&sort_define=&sort_order=&rows=

[33] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/france

[34] Document 32

[35] Julian Jackson, op.cit., p.518

[36] Ibidem, p.519

[37] Ibidem, p.521

[38] Yad Vashem, Testimonial sheet

[39] Ovidiu Raețchi, op.cit., ,Editura Litera, București, 2022, p.479

[40] Julian Jackson, op.cit., p.522

[41] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marseille_roundup

[42] Spain, Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center

[43] Julian Jackson, op.cit., p.522

[44] Ibidem, p.523

[45] Ibidem, p.289

[46] https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/childrens-homes/izieu/index.asp

[47] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafle_de_l%27avenue_Secr%C3%A9tan

[48] Document 28

[49] Timothy Snyder, op.cit., p.230